The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire

Carlos Torres

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119236825, 9781119236719
• eBook ISBN: 9781119236764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Provides new insights on the lasting impact of famed philosopher and educator Paulo Freire

50 years after the publication of his masterpiece, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this book brings new perspectives on rethinking and reinventing Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. Written by the most premier exponents and experts of Freirean scholarship, it explores the currency of Freire's contribution to social theory, educational reform, and democratic education. It also analyzes the intersections of Freire's theories with other crucial social theorists such as Gramsci, Gandhi, Habermas, Dewey, Sen, etc.

The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire studies the history and context of the man as a global public intellectual, moving from Brazil to the rest of the world and back. Each section offers insides on the epistemology of the global south initiated by Freire with his work in Latin America; the connections between class, gender, race, religion, the state and eco-pedagogy in the work of Freire; and the contributions he made to democratic education and educational reform.

• Presents original theory and analysis of Freire's life and work
• Offers unique and comprehensive analysis of the reception and application of Paulo Freire in international education on all continents
• Provides a complete historical study of Freire's contributions to education
• Systematically analyzes the impact of Freire in teachers training, higher education, and lifelong learning

The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire is an ideal book for courses on international and comparative education, pedagogy, education policy, international development, and Latin America studies.

Part I
History and Context of a Global Public Intellectual

Introduction: Paulo Freire and the Dialectics of the Local and the Global

Carlos Alberto Torres

This introduction situates the life and work of Paulo Freire in the context of the multiple analyses, appraisals, and insights that are presented in 31 chapters plus the introduction of this handbook. Likewise, the introduction offers clues of the narrative thread running through the different chapters.

The work has been done over 3 years, with a large number of experts on Freire collaborating with the original idea: to bring a new perspective on reinventing Freire 50 years after the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Furthermore, the authors explore the currency of Freire's contribution for social theory, educational reform, and democratic education.

The authors of this handbook represent different life stories, genders, ethnicities, languages, nationalities, continents, nations, regions, religions, academic experiences, specialties, theories, and methodologies. All together they created a crucial interdisciplinary work in terms of fields of studies as well as analytical and normative premises. Accordingly, all of them found resonance in the voice, theories, methods, and praxis of Paulo Freire. They decided to write, with complete autonomy, a chapter for the book on a generic topic that I initially suggested, given, from their own individual or collective perspective, the orientation, nuances, and articulation of the topic in its final form as a chapter.

A message emerges from the Wiley Handbook on Freire: In pedagogy, today, we can be with Freire or against Freire but not without Freire.

History and Context of a Global Public Intellectual

The violence of the oppressed is not violence, but a legitimate response; it is the affirmation of a being who no longer fears freedom and who knows that it is not a gift, but a conquest.¹

Public intellectuals are willing and able, through their research and teaching, their public work in mass media, and their analytical and symbolic work, to construct narratives that defend and justify specific models of social order, social governance, and even interpretations of history. In the case of Freire, it is imperative to situate his contributions from his inception into the domains of education in Northeast Brazil, to Latin America in the 1960s, and his reception in the rest of the world.

The 1960s impelled fabulous and explosive projects in which the vision that everything was possible, from individual transformation to revolution, reached paroxysmal proportions. This phenomenon seized Latin America and many other parts of the world. In that period as well a very important Latin American literary phenomenon had an impact on the wider world. Known as the Latin American Boom, young writers such as Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Marquez among others created original literary works that for many branded forever Latin America as the land of magic realism. Yet the boom was much more than that (Kerr & Herrero‐Olaizola, 2015).

Latin America was a laboratory for a new society. Public intellectuals like Freire creatively developed different theoretical perspectives that melded and converged into a single purpose of radical social transformation. These notions of radical change were founded on a group of theories and politico‐philosophical, sociological, and theological orientations, which defined the era's spiritual path as daring, libertarian, and creative.

It was Herbert Marcuse who suggested that Hegel's use of the German neologism Volksgeist (spirit of nation)² included a nation's spirit as well as its history, its religion, and its level of political participation. The Volksgeist of Latin America in the 1960s had direct links to revolution and the transgression of established norms. Its immediate by‐products were critical thinking, original scientific innovation and utopian politics.

This Volksgeist was born and raised in a wealth of ancient traditions and millennial cultures that inhabit this diverse continent whose Indigenous, African, Levantine, and European roots protruded through the landscape and shaped the social contradictions in this bronco continent.

Latin America was also the fertile ground of distinctive academic and political contributions in the form of theories that sought to explain development (or the lack thereof) and, at the same time, pushed for the transformation of its reality.

Among these was dependency theory, created in the 1950s–1960s in Chilean academic circles, which burst into bloom with the publication of a now classic book, Dependency and Development in Latin America by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979) that spread throughout the continent, articulating one of the most systematic critiques of the traditional capitalist model of economic underdevelopment and, by extension, to theories of democracy.³

Although Dependency and Development was a groundbreaking book, many other authors and their works are also worth mentioning: André Gunder Frank (1969) and Theotonio dos Santos (1978); the critical works of the United Nations Economic Commission of Latin America (ECLA or CEPAL in Spanish)⁴; Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (1969); and Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1981) to name just a few scholars who made fundamental contributions by examining and explaining Latin American underdevelopment in terms of the exploitation given the context of capitalism center‐periphery and internal colonialism of the region.

We cannot forget in this brief racconto the extraordinary contribution of Raúl Prebisch (Love, 1980 , pp. 45–72) with his theory of unequal exchange that influenced the work of many other noted scholars (with their own appraisal of course) including Arghiri Emmanuel, André Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Johan Galtung, and Samir Amin as well as many developmental programs of Latin American governments in the 1950s and 1960s (Love, 1980). Prebisch was the executive director of ECLA and in 1950 released a seminal document titled The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (Archivo Cepal).⁵

Nor can we forget Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the human embodiment of that period's revolutionary spirit both in his life and his death, whose speech in Punta del Este, Uruguay at the plenary session of the Inter‐American Economic and Social Council on August 16, 1961, represented the most ferocious and articulate rejection of the North American development model, exemplified by the neocolonial stance of the Alliance for Progress.

After his death in 1967, Guevara became a model and icon of social transformation in the region and elsewhere. His face was emblematic of the struggles of the New Left, against the traditional communist and socialist parties (the Old Left) that were seen by a new generation as the product of the Cold War accommodating to the establishment. The year 1968 was the culmination of the New Left strand ready to start a new path of social struggles in Paris as well as in Prague, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and many other places (Gould, 2009).

Along with the criticism of these development models, a new perspective called Liberation Philosophy was expounded in academic circles by Latin American philosophers, many of them graduates of European universities. Prominent among these was the Argentinian and Mexican theologian, philosopher, and historian, Enrique Dussel (1973).⁶ Freire was without doubt one of the precursors not only of the theology of liberation but also of the philosophy of liberation, though originally filtered through the developmentalist lenses of the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileros (ISEB)—see Gadotti, Chapter 1 in this volume.

The philosophical model of the philosophy of liberation had analytical hinges forged by Christian personalism, existentialism, and phenomenology but incorporated a Marxist perspective as well, questioning the notion of “alterity” in Western reasoning and attempting to incorporate the mores...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Audrey Azoulay, Director‐General of UNESCO for The Wiley Handbook on Paulo Freire
• Part I: History and Context of a Global Public Intellectual
• Part II: From Recife to the World: Paulo Freire, Pilgrim of Utopia
• Part III: Freire and the Epistemology of the Global South: Intersections and Relationships
• Part IV: Class, Gender, Race, Religion, the State, and a “Missing Chapter” in Freire’s Oeuvre
• Part V: Paulo Freire and the Construction of Democratic Education: What Is Freire’s Currency for Educational Reform?
• Index
• End User License Agreement